The building structure of conventional hospitals differs only slightly from the structure of residential and office buildings.
Rather large hospitals or clinics often consist of a building with a plurality of floors. Usually there are central stairwells and elevator shafts, from which corridors extend leading to the patient rooms and to the treatment stations.
As a consequence of this basic concept, patient care in conventional hospitals is quite costly and time-consuming because the medical staff has to walk long distances to go from one room to another room. In addition to patient care, supply with medicines, food, clean laundry etc. is required. The paths for delivering the articles needed for this supply are intersecting with the paths on which the patients reach a treatment station or go outside. This also causes considerable complexity. Food and laundry is usually transported on carts that are moved by hand, which is tiring and sometimes even dangerous.
Furthermore, a disadvantage of the large overlapping of paths along which supply articles as well as patients are transported is the risk of spreading infectious pathogens and viruses, for instance by having contaminated delivered food or delivered laundry that is transported through the hospital when passing past a sick patient who is transported through the same corridor, for example.
Due to the high complexity and due to cost pressures in the health system, the currently operating hospitals and clinics have to restrict their medical care services more and more, in order to be able to maintain cost-effective operation.